Thinkydoers®

We talk a lot around here about Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), and in this episode, we dive into an adjacent topic: the role that goal setting can play in making a case for and achieving important change in our organizations. The audio for this episode is from a LinkedIn Live that I hosted recently (if you'd like to hear about our every-other Wednesday Live gatherings, join our email list). Those Live sessions are geared toward changemaker leaders and strategic implementors within organizations who are hungry for ways to increase change effectiveness, increase employee engagement, and spend more time focused on achievement of their most important priorities.  In this episode, we look at: A few of the factors that make change hard for people and teams; Separating myth from fact about goal setting for change; The importance of shifting how we think about goals from a win-lose mindset to a win-learn mindset; I share some important tips for changemakers to increase their effectiveness at making the case for and achieving change in their work; And share a set of key questions you can use to unblock change. I also share some updates about opportunities to work with me this month to help set your 2023 up for success: Join us for the week-long No BS OKRs series focused on achieving change, which kicks off next week (asynchronously on Dec 12, first workshop on Dec 13); We have two very rare individual coaching slots available in our monthly membership 1:1 coaching schedule; and I'm in the early stages of planning a cohort of our deep-dive Leading the Connected Strategic Organization learning series specifically for people who are neurodivergent. This course is for people leaders (and aspiring people leaders) who want to improve their skills with communicating expectations clearly; leading through conflict; and leading their teams for growth and high performance. This class and what we practice in it are helpful for all leaders, but we're hearing especially positive feedback from autistic participants,  leaders with ADHD, and people who have cognitive impacts from trauma. The approaches we learn and practice give leaders a toolkit they can adapt to their work (and fills in a lot of blanks for many of us who have struggled to develop effective leadership and management mechanics) to reduce the cognitive overhead of leading people and help us refocus on goal achievement and leading our teams for growth.  For more information on any of the above, find me at http://redcurrantco.com or email hello@redcurrantco.com.  Show notes and transcript are slightly delayed, but will follow tomorrow (Friday) at http://thinkydoers.com .

We're closing enrollment on Friday for next week's Coaching Evolutionary OKRs course, so if you're looking for OKR Coach training before the end of the year, act quickly (or drop me a note, and I'll let you know when we plan our next cohort). And if a short course is more your style, that's coming this November! After years of focusing on deep-dive training for leaders & teams in goal-oriented organizations, I'm VERY excited to be launching a short course on efficient Objective and Key Result (OKR) creation next month! In this one week, three session (60-90 min each) cohort-based course, you'll learn our intuitive approach to creating useful, impactful OKRs quickly and efficiently, so you can get to the work of achieving them as rapidly as possible! This quick episode gives a few more details about that class (as well as some other ways to work with me to get ready for your 2023 reset). If you'd like to join the no-obligation waitlist for No BS OKRs, you can find more information here: http://findrc.co/nobsokrs

When the book Measure What Matters was published in 2018, it created a lot of excitement about Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. Unfortunately, the book provided little practical information about implementing them, and many organizations have struggled to actually make OKRs work in the wild. Now we are seeing a rapidly growing OKR software market which is expected to reach $2.6 billion by 2023 but there is still a lot of confusion around the implementation and the potential benefits of OKRs. In today’s episode, we are going to look at what OKRs are and give you a few tips to keep in mind when you start to hear these words around your workplace – especially with the “goal-ification” of OKRs that we’re seeing with product releases including Microsoft Viva Goals and Asana Goals -- with OKRs being incorporated even into non-specialty software. OKR platforms and goal software have their place: but they aren’t required to start and operate a successful goal-setting and goal-achievement rhythm. We then go into detail about our specific definition and usage of “Key Results” in the term “Objectives and Key Results” to explain why that phrase should be treated as a term of art, as well as why Key Results – in the Connected Strategic® model – don’t typically describe activity. To find out how OKRs can help fill the gap between your company’s big outcome goals and the work you actually need to do to reach them, give this one a listen. We're getting ready to announce some big new business model shifts that will make our OKR and leadership development support more accessible for customers outside of our current large consulting model: for the sneak peek, subscribe to our Red Currant Co Newsletter at http://findrc.co .

This time of year is called the "silly season" in motorsports because we're in the literal middle of our racing season AND we're all already operating in the 2023 season: planning partnerships, talent moves, and logistics for the year we won't start for another six months.  Every summer I see something really similar with my corporate clients who set goals annually: sometimes between mid-July and September, even IF the organization did a mid-year reset after Q2, we find ourselves looking at our annual goals, scratching our heads, and wondering, "What were we thinking?" For organizations that set goals annually in November or December of the previous year: when we set those goals, we did so based on the information we had at the time. Now, we have seven (or so) more months of information that may line up with or be dramatically different than the assumptions we set those goals based on. We know a lot more right now about what our goals for this year could or should have been. But, generally, now is not the time to "revisit" or "reset" our annual goals. In a lot of situations, it's better to stay the course, notice what we're learning about our goals while we work with them right now, and get ready for our next annual planning cycle (which is just around the corner) to improve, with what we learn during this "growing pains" phase. This episode talks about a couple of specific opportunities that you can leverage for learning right now, while we're "living with" annual goals that may feel awkward: The creative exercise of evolving (not changing) Objective language; and What we can learn right now that makes us smarter about our most important organizational measures of success, which we may reflect next year as a North Star Metric and/or Topline Measures. This awkward mid-year growing pain phase can be a source of frustration, and it can be a really valuable source of information and learning that helps us do better with our next round of annual goal-setting. Visit http://thinkydoers.com to share your thoughts about this episode, and to learn more about creating and leading Connected Strategic™ organizations.

In our last episode, our host Sara Lobkovich took the antiquated concept of "managing up" to task. This episode is part two in this two-part series, where we dive into why and how organizations can replace "managing up" with building a culture of self-management. With norms established around expectations and goal alignment, communication, and candor and truthfulness, organizations can center their most important outcomes more effectively; manage healthy conflict to achieve necessary change; and trade inefficient spin- and politically-motivated posturing for increased comfort with difficult truths so that blockers can be tackled head-on.  A culture of consistent self-management reduces cognitive overhead for workers and leaders and gives everyone in the organization a shared language and practices to help increase mutual understanding of expectations and how people can succeed, together.  We'll introduce the three foundational elements of self-management: Clear expectations (and aligned goals) Mindful communication, and Candor & factfulness and seven supportive factors that improve self-management effectiveness: Intentional fidelity Accountability & ownership Collaboration and cooperation (and knowing the difference) Emotional regulation Conflict competence Self-awareness, and Intellectual humility.  These skills can be learned and developed by leaders and "doers" alike. You'll hear how self-management ultimately enables everyone in the organization to do their best work: from the C-suite to the summer intern.

This is the first in a two-part series about why we work with clients to uncover and unlearn the behavior of "managing up," and replace it with a culture of self-management. It IS necessary to carefully and intentionally manage our relationships at work (up, down, and across), but the way managing up is coached in many organizations centers leaders instead of the work itself. The practice is inefficient, inequitable, and often emphasizes spin over substance. And many people who rely on managing up to move up the ladder in their organizations find that "what got you here won't get you there" when they land in a role where you can't "manage up" your way to critical outcomes. Next week, we'll share the second part of this series about how we replace "managing up" and other political and power-based ways of leading and organizing organizations and teams with more equitable, efficient and outcome-driving self-management practices.    

By this point in the year -- 1/3 of the way through Q1 -- many of us have already abandoned any New Years Resolutions we set -- and in our work lives, we may still be digging out from year-end, having missed a month of achievement toward our 2022 goals. We're not going to start with goal-setting today -- most of you have already done that step. Instead, we're going to learn a bit more about the types of goals you've set already, and share a few simple steps to help you get your goal achievement plan on track. I'll share a few words and meanings that are helpful for shared understanding when we're working with goals, and then share a step-by-step from Michael B. Stanier's book, "The Coaching Habit," which I find helpful for scaffolding the step we often miss: actually planning the behavior change necessary to achieve the goals we set.  Show notes and a transcript, as well as contact information if you have questions, are available at thinkydoers.com.

Thinky-doers are those of us whose work spans the spaces between thought, through the messy middle, into doing. I'm a thinky-doer, and I'm here to help others create less friction, and more flow in our work.